Monday, March 19, 2018

Twin paradox and distributed systems

In the future we definetely will travel through the Universe. And the speed of the starships will be close to the speed of light, or even probably beyond it (as you can see in some movies). Therefore according to the twin paradox all the clocks will have different time. Intergalactic distributed computer network will be really difficult, and eventually (I hope so) constistent.

So, I have some questions:

How will the clocks in computers on the starships, stations, and planets be syncronized?

There are special data structure called CRDT (conflict-free replicated data type) but is also uses timestamps.

Probably we need to find some source/invariant of global time (but how can we break the laws of physics (may be quantum physics can help here)), or find a way to make amendments base on straship acceleration/speed/traveled distance if it is possible.